Andrew Selee

Andrew Selee was named Executive Vice President of the Wilson Center in January 2014. Prior to this position, Selee was the Wilson Center’s Vice President for Programs. He was the founding Director the Center’s Mexico Institute from 2003-12. He is an adjunct professor of Government at Johns Hopkins University and of International Affairs at George Washington University and has been a visiting professor at El Colegio de Mexico.

His most recent publications are What Should Think Tanks Do? A Strategic Guide for Policy Impact (Stanford University Press, 2013), Mexico and the United States: The Politics of Partnership (Lynne Rienner, 2013), and Mexico's Democratic Challenges (Stanford University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010). He has written extensively on U.S.-Mexico relations, Mexican politics, U.S. immigration policy, organized crime, and democracy in Latin America.

His public opinion articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Americas Quarterly, and other media, and he writes a biweekly column in the Mexican newspaper El Universal. He is interviewed frequently in the press, including PBS, NBC, CBS, Fox News, NPR, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post,Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

Selee is co-director of the Regional Migration Study Group, convened by the Migration Policy Institute and the Wilson Center, and was a member of Council on Foreign Relations' Task Force on Immigration. He is a long-time volunteer of the YMCA and was a member of the YMCA of the USA’s National Board and International Committee.

Prior to joining the Wilson Center as a program associate in the Latin American Program in 2000, he was a professional staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives and worked for five years with the YMCA of Baja California in Tijuana, Mexico, helping to start a community center and a home for migrant youth.

Education

Ph.D. in Policy Studies from the University of Maryland; M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego; B.A. in Latin American Studies (Phi Beta Kappa) from Washington University in St. Louis.

Major Publications

What Should Think Tanks Do? A Strategic Guide for Policy Impact (Stanford University Press, 2013);

Mexico and the United States: The Politics of Partnership (Lynne Rienner, 2013, co-edited with Peter H. Smith);

Decentralization, Democratization, and Informal Power in Mexico (Penn State University Press, 2011)

Related Content for this Expert

Calderon delivered his final state-of-the-nation speech on Monday, trying to cement his legacy as the president who stabilized the economy and took on the country's entrenched organized crime groups, putting Mexico on the road to rule of law...The Mexico Institute's Andrew Selee comments. more

Vice President for Programs and Senior Advisor of the Mexico Institute, Andrew Selee comments on Friday mornings incident in which two employees of the U.S. embassy in Mexico City were shot by Mexican federal police who may have confused them for organized crime members. more

Vice President for Programs and Senior Advisor of the Mexico Institute, Andrew Selee was quoted in El Universal’s article discussing Mitt Romney’s proposed plan to achieve energy independence in 2020 in collaboration with Mexico and Canada. This article is in Spanish. more

A group of border mayors who met in San Diego on Friday called for nontraditional financing, including public-private partnerships, to build badly needed border crossings in the face of limited federal funding. The Mexico Institute's Andrew Selee comments. more

The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, IFAI, the Citizen’s Initiative for the Promotion of the Culture of Dialogue, and CIDE are pleased to invite you to, “Access to Information and Accountability: A Global Context.” The aim of the event will be to exchange views on the impact of the right to access information and its use by civil society in order to increase governmental accountability. more

Using a comparative approach to incorporate research initiatives into a global context can make a significant contribution to the current understanding of migration. In partnership with the Social Science Research Council, the Kennan Institute will host leading specialists on migration issues from Russia and the United States to discuss their most recent work, as well as share preliminary findings from research supported by the National Science Foundation. This research was conducted as part of the MINERVA initiative grant “People, Power, and Conflict in the Eurasian Migration System,” led by Cynthia Buckley, Beth Mitchneck, and Blair Ruble. more

The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands and The Woodrow Wilson Center cordially invite you to join co-hosts Mel Martinez, former United States Senator from Florida and House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-CA) for a discussion on policy options for the Future of U.S.-Mexico Relations.
**Please note, this event will be held in Tampa, FL at the Republican National Convention. This event will still take place at the scheduled time from 9:30am-11am.**
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The Co-Chairmen of the Latino Leadership Task Force say it’s in U.S. economic and security interests to place greater focus and forge more partnerships with Latin American countries.Their remarks came during the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute & the Pacific Council on International Policy panel discussion Monday on how to change U.S. policy to address the region’s growth. more

The likely return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in Mexico has prompted Mexicans and Texans alike to question whether the party’s former alleged practice of making deals with cartel members will be the standard after President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto is sworn in Dec. 1...The Mexico Institute's Andrew Selee comments. more

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The Co-Chairmen of the Latino Leadership Task Force say it’s in U.S. economic and security interests to place greater focus and forge more partnerships with Latin American countries.Their remarks came during the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute & the Pacific Council on International Policy panel discussion Monday on how to change U.S. policy to address the region’s growth.

The likely return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in Mexico has prompted Mexicans and Texans alike to question whether the party’s former alleged practice of making deals with cartel members will be the standard after President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto is sworn in Dec. 1...The Mexico Institute's Andrew Selee comments.

For deeper analysis and background on the July 1 elections in Mexico, we have collected a selection of insights from Mexico Institute staff and colleagues on the PRI's rise to power, the prospects for security, economic, and energy policy, the impact on U.S.-Mexico relations and the future of Mexican democracy. This list will be continually updated on the Mexico Institute homepage as more articles are released.

Despite a history of anti-Americanism, the Institutional Revolutionary Party's win in Mexico's Presidential elections Sunday is not likely to dramatically alter U.S.-Mexico relations, Andrew Selee writes for CNN.com.

Left-leaning candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is climbing back into the limelight in Mexico, where a late bump in the polls has boosted his stature before the nation’s July 1 presidential election. The Mexico Institute's Andrew Selee comments.

President Barack Obama attended a summit in Latin America that may have as much resonance in domestic politics as in hemispheric economics. Discussions at the meeting of North and South American leaders in the resort city of Cartagena, Colombia, covered trade, economic growth and the battle against drug trafficking.

President Obama travels to a weekend summit of the hemisphere’s leaders Friday as the head of a nation that remains in many ways the economic envy of its closest neighbors, but also one whose influence is on the wane in a rising region...

The Woodrow Wilson Center and the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands cordially invite you to the launching of a report that contains a set of fresh policy recommendations for the winners of the U.S. and Mexican 2012 presidential elections.

The Wilson Center, Hispanics in Philanthropy, the Washington Office on Latin America, and the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility hosted a panel discussion on, The America’s Future in the Balance: Persistent Underfunding of Latino Communities across the Americas.

CIDE University in Mexico City, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Latin American Program, the Inter-American Dialogue,
the Latin American Initiative at the Brookings Institution, and the CSIS America’s Program were pleased to host the launch of the report on public opinion in the Americas.

Once every twelve years, presidential elections in Mexico and the United States fall in the same year. Mexico Institute Director Andrew Selee and Senior Associate Eric L. Olson examined the current political landscape in Mexico and the implications for the 2012 presidential elections in both countries.

A diverse team of experts discussed Mexico’s political landscape as the country prepares for presidential elections in 2012. They examined prospects for the major candidates and parties, how the economy, security and foreign relations are likely to be debated, and the health of Mexico’s electoral system.

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This publication is the result of a meeting which took place in Mexico City in June 2004. Participants from Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and the United States sought to understand the theoretical possibilities and the practical achievements of citizen participation and public deliberation in local governments in Mexico.

This publication examines specific challenges for security cooperation between the United States and Mexico including efforts to address the consumption of narcotics, money laundering, arms trafficking, intelligence sharing, policy strengthening, judicial reform, civil-military relations, and the protection of journalists.

This volume explores one of the crucial intersections of political and economic change: how the reform of the central state in the form of policies of decentralization has affected democratic governance in different countries and at different levels of society.The book is a product of a two-year project on decentralization which included both national-level and comparative research.

This volume offers several of the presentations from a May 2000 this conference which address political and social transition in Mexico, new directions in economic policy, and the changing nature of U.S.-Mexico relations.

The intense debate on immigration policy in the United States in recent years has largely focused on how to regulate immigrants’ roles as workers, their impact on public spending, and how to reconcile labor market, community, and family needs with workable and humane law enforcement. These are important debates, and their outcome will determine the character of U.S. society for generations to come. However, far less has been written about the role that immigrants play in the civic and political life of communities throughout the United States. This volume aims to fill that void by focusing on the contributions that Latin American immigrants are making to U.S. communities and the barriers they face in seeking to do so.

This empirically grounded collection examines the growth of participatory institutions in Latin American democracy and how such institutions affect representative government. Selee and Peruzzotti analyze specific cases in Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina.

Decentralization, Democratic Governance, and Civil Society in Comparative Perspective studies the relation of decentralization to democratization at both intermediate and local levels and analyzes how decentralization is transforming the relationship between the state and civil society. This book presents case studies from six countries in three continents in which decentralization of some parts of government has been attempted: Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Kenya, the Philippines, and Indonesia.More about this title can be found on the Wilson Center Press website.

In this paper we look at what the two governments have done over the past two years to move forward on their commitments. We find that there have been steady advances in each of the areas they committed to address, but that the results so far are far less than what is needed to address the threat posed by organized crime groups.

An overview of Mexico's Politics, Economy, and Society and an assessment of key issues in U.S.-Mexico Relations with particular focus on economic integration, security cooperation, migration, and the U.S.-Mexico border.

Andrew Selee is director of the Mexico Institute, having previously served as senior program associate for the Latin American Program. Prior to that, he served as professional staff for the United States House of Representatives. Eric Olson is senior advisor to the Security Initiative of the Mexico Institute. Prior to joining the Wilson Center, he worked with the Organization of American States and also with Amnesty International U.S.A.

Andrew Selee is director of the Mexico Institute, having previously served as senior program associate for the Latin American Program. Prior to that, he served as professional staff for the United States House of Representatives.
Eric Olson is senior advisor to the Security Initiative of the Mexico Institute. Prior to joining the Wilson Center, he worked with the Organization of American States and also with Amnesty International U.S.A.

Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center and Felipe Aguero, Professor in the Department of International Studies at the University of Miami and a current Fellow of the Wilson Center

Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center and Felipe Aguero, Professor in the Department of International Studies at the University of Miami and a current Fellow of the Wilson Center